From October 7 to December 31, 2023, one in every five hate-speech events invoked Israel’s war, a phenomenon that peaked in November.
Anti-Muslim hate speech surged by 62 percent during the latter half of 2023 compared to the preceding six months in India, according to a recent report from a Washington-based research group, which added that the Israel-Gaza war played a key role in the last three months. The India Hate Lab (IHL) documented 668 hate speech incidents targeting Muslims in 2023, 255 of which occurred in the first half of the year while 413 took place in the last six months of 2023.
The report, released on Monday, reveals that approximately 75 percent of these incidents, totaling 498 cases, occurred in states governed by the BJP. Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh were identified as hotspots for hate speech.
Between October 7 — when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, sparking the conflict in the Gaza Strip as Israel retaliated — and December 31, there were 41 incidents of hate speech against Indian Muslims that mentioned the war, the report added. It constituted about 20 percent of such incidents in the last quarter of 2023.
A third of all hate speech events documented by the IHL were organised by two far-right organisations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal, which are associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of the BJP. In 2018, the United States Central Intelligence Agency tagged the VHP and Bajrang Dal as “religious militant organisations”.
“Our analysis shows that anti-Muslim hate speech has been normalised and become part of India’s socio-political sphere,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, founder of the IHL. “We foresee rampant use of anti-Muslim hate during the upcoming general elections to polarise voters.”
The research group employed the United Nations” definition of hate speech, which encompasses prejudiced or discriminatory language targeting individuals or groups based on various attributes, including religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, or gender.
Rights groups and critics have raised concerns about the treatment of Muslims under Prime Minister Modi”s leadership since 2014, with contentious policies such as the 2019 citizenship law labeled as “fundamentally discriminatory” by the UN human rights office. The introduction of anti-conversion legislation, which challenges the constitutionally protected right to freedom of belief, and the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir”s special status in 2019 have drawn widespread condemnation. Instances such as the demolition of Muslim properties under the guise of removing illegal constructions and the prohibition of wearing the hijab in classrooms in Karnataka, during BJP governance in the state, further exacerbate tensions.
India Hate Lab, an organization monitoring hate speech, utilised various methodologies, including tracking online activities of Hindu nationalist groups, verifying hate speech videos on social media platforms, and compiling data from isolated incidents reported by Indian media, to shed light on the alarming rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Last month, IHL’s website was rendered inaccessible in India after the government blocked it under the controversial Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000. The government also blocked the website of Hindutva Watch, an independent hate-crime tracker also run by the IHL’s founder.
